Prolific activist "Medicare for all" activist Ady Barkan, who led protests over healthcare policy at the Capitol and elsewhere and directly confronted legislators, has died at the age of 39 from complications of the terminal neurodegenerative disease ALS.

Barkan's political organization, Be a Hero, announced late on Wednesday evening that he had passed at 6:00 p.m. local time in Santa Barbara, California.

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Barkan was born on Dec. 18, 1983, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and eventually Pasadena, California. Among his first political activities was campaigning for Democratic representative Adam Schiff.

After earning his law degree from Yale in 2010, Barkan became a full-time activist during the early stages of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in Lower Manhattan in 2011.

He became an outspoken advocate for liberal healthcare reform after his diagnosis with ALS in 2016, shortly after the birth of his first child. The average survival time with ALS, often called Lou Gehrig's disease, is two to five years.

In 2017, Barkan rose to greater prominence after confronting Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) regarding his impending vote on tax cuts that would affect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security payments.

"He is the single most important swing vote in this tax bill, and I need to tell him my story to vote against it," Barkan said at the time. Flake eventually voted for the tax cuts.

In a statement mourning Barkan's death, former House speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that he rallied millions of people "to defend hard-won protections for persons with disabilities and for patients’ rights, and to expand access to quality health care for all."

Barkan launched Be a Hero in 2018, which has grown to include two nonprofit groups and a political action committee that advocates a range of liberal causes in addition to healthcare policy.

"Ady believed everyone deserves access to the health care they need to give them more days with the people they love, doing the things they love, and he devoted his final years to that work," Be a Hero published on social media late Wednesday evening.

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Barkan is survived by his wife, Rachel King; their two children, Carl, 7, and Willow, 3; his brother Muki Barkan; his aunt, Deborah Schrag; his mother, Diana Kormos Buchwald; and his father, Elazar Barkan.

"The Be a Hero team shares in the profound grief of all who knew and loved Ady," said Barkan's PAC.